Lost and Found
by 12cubed
Summary: Caroline and Tyler look for Klaus's sword (missing scene from 4x14.)


"Ugh. We are never going to find that stupid thing!" Caroline slammed a drawer shut in frustration. "This McMansion has, like, five hundred rooms. It could be _anywhere._"

"We'll find it." Tyler turned around from the bookcase where he'd been pulling out books at random, searching to see if Klaus's sword was hidden behind them. They looked at each other, and Caroline knew that he was thinking the same thing she was: if they didn't get to the cure in time and Klaus got out...

"We'll find it," she echoed. "We just have to keep looking." She went over to Tyler, forcing herself to think, to try and turn off the endless commentary in her head that somehow never seemed to _shut up_, and focus on this one thing. Think. Think. _Think._

"Uh...Caroline?" She looked up, startled out of her thoughts by the sound of Tyler's voice. "I don't think you have to do that."

"Do what?" She followed his glance and realized that she'd been automatically putting the books back on the shelves...in alphabetical order. She sighed in exasperation. "Awesome. We're looking for a crucial clue to find the cure and I'm wasting time _reorganizing._"

"No, it's fine. I mean, it's good." Tyler was actually smiling, which Caroline found inexplicable. He shrugged, and jammed his hands in his pockets. "Kinda reminds me of the last time we went on a treasure hunt."

The day they'd found Mason's diary. Caroline found herself smiling, too, remembering. The silence of the woods around them, the sunlight filtered through the branches overhead, the smell of crushed leaves underfoot, and the cool darkness of the Lockwood cellar.

It felt like a hundred years ago. Which was ironic, given that she was only a little over one year into an immortal life.

"Maybe there's an armory and the sword is in full view there," said Caroline. "Like Edgar Allan Poe and _The Purloined Letter._ Or maybe it's hidden behind one of his paintings. In the wall. Or it could be behind the canvas, in the frame."

"Jesus. Then it really would take forever to find it," said Tyler, looking around him. He rolled his eyes. "Pony Boy's been pretty productive, huh? He's probably moved on to drawing kittens." His tone was casual, mocking, but there was a bitterness in his voice that hadn't been there before.

"Not kittens," said Caroline, trying to lighten the mood. "_Hummingbirds._" She arched her eyebrows at the look of recognition on Tyler's face. "You were eavesdropping, weren't you? At Miss Mystic."

"Whatever," said Tyler. "Everything he said was a load of bullshit, anyway."

Caroline thought back over that day. The flower arrangements and the string quartet, the frustrating incompetence of the younger girls, fighting with Elena...and Damon. Damon lurking in the background, Damon forcing his way into their dressing room, Damon, Damon, Damon, his voice boring like a drill into her head. And Klaus.

She suddenly felt queasy, and half-regretted bringing the whole thing up in the first place. But somehow, her stupid mouth just kept on moving, the way it always did. "I was jealous too, you know. Of Little Miss She-Wolf. Hayley." Caroline bit her lip. God, what was wrong with her?

Still, it felt good to say it out loud, somehow.

"Hayley?" Tyler didn't seem angry. Just puzzled, though Caroline didn't see what was so complicated about it. "But I told you, we're just friends. Well, I thought we were," he said, turning away. "She just wanted to keep an eye on Klaus, or talk to that Shane guy. Or spy on us. On me."

Caroline didn't say anything. She sort of hated herself for being relieved that she had an actual reason to dislike Hayley now. And yet, if anything, that made her resent the other girl less. She thought Hayley _had_ cared, more than Tyler realized. And maybe...maybe she didn't even have a right to judge the other girl, given what had happened to Chris. No, what she'd _helped do_ to Chris. But Caroline didn't want to think about that. Time to change the subject.

She walked over to a locked leather box and tore off the lid, pulling the hinges off with ease. "Gotta say, having super-strength doesn't exactly suck." She started rifling through the contents.

"Wouldn't you miss that, though?" said Tyler. "I mean, if you-" Something in his voice made Caroline stop mid-search and look back at him. "If you took the cure." She saw him swallow, and look down at the floor. "Do you want to?"

It was the last thing she'd expected to hear. It had just never come up. Nobody had bothered to ask her-not even Klaus, at Miss Mystic. Sure, he'd posed the question, but it had only been a setup for his stalkery speechifying.

"I thought you didn't give a rat's ass about the cure." The answer came out sharper than she'd intended.

"I don't. I didn't. It's just-" Tyler's voice was hesitant, quiet. "You and Stefan. You always talked about the cure like it was for Elena."

"It _is_ for Elena," said Caroline. "That's why this whole thing started in the first place."

"But I thought...if you wanted it for yourself, you'd have said so." He said it like it was the most natural thing in the world. Caroline was getting more irritated by the second, though she wasn't sure at whom. Tyler. Herself. The universe.

"It's not that simple," she snapped.

"Why not?"

"Because...because it just isn't, OK?" Caroline turned away from Tyler and went back to looking through the box, lifting the contents out beside her, almost slamming them down on the polished parquet flooring.

She'd _thought_ about it, sure. How could she not? And usually, she would have made a list of pros and cons, debated it from every possible angle, but this...some part of her had wanted to ignore it, run from it. It had lurked around the edges of her consciousness, speaking in whispers that she could never quite block out, no matter how hard she tried. You were supposed to want the cure, right? That's why it was called a _cure._ But every time she thought about becoming human again, going back to her life Before...

"Caroline." Tyler came up to stand next to her, waiting until she turned to face him again. "I'm sorry I didn't ask," he said. "I shouldn't have just-I'm sorry." He took a deep breath, then went on, "You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to. But if you do-I'm here."

"It's OK," said Caroline. "Maybe I didn't want to talk about it, before. I don't know." Something about Tyler's words, and the look in his eyes, was infinitely comforting, and she found her anger fading as rapidly as it had flared up. And for the first time, she stopped pushing away her own thoughts about the cure, and let them in instead, letting herself think and feel what she'd known to be true all along.

Tyler was still watching her, waiting. She could tell him. She didn't want to discuss it with anyone else, and she didn't want to go into the whys and wherefores of it, but she could tell him. "The thing is," she said, "I'm...I'm pretty sure I don't want it. The cure, I mean. I think-I think I'm good at being a vampire."

She was surprised by Tyler's reaction: he seemed almost...relieved. She went on quickly, "But can we not talk about it right now? It's just. We'll have plenty of time. Later. When everyone gets back."

"Sure," said Tyler. He cleared his throat. "Yeah, sure. Of course."

"Besides, it's not like-" She was pulling out a sheaf of old documents when the words on one of them caught her eye, and she realized it was a letter. She read it. Then she started reading another. And another.

"What is it?" Tyler stepped up beside her, and she handed over the letters without a word. There was a pause while he took in what he was seeing, and then-"Who are these from? Are they-"

"I don't know." Caroline felt a shiver run up her spine. "Ugh, seriously?! This house is starting to give me the creeps." She realized that her palms were sweating, and she wiped them quickly on her dress. Klaus could act so...so _normal_ sometimes. And just when your guard was down: that's when he reminded you who he really was.

_"Caroline, you're beautiful, but if you don't stop talking, I will kill you."_

Well, she hadn't stopped talking. And Klaus had tried to kill her.

_"If you don't stop talking, I will kill you."_

That was it, wasn't it? The "You're beautiful" was nothing. Meant nothing. Objects could be beautiful. A marble sculpture that you could shatter to pieces in a fit of anger, a painting that you could slash into ribbons in the blink of an eye. Caroline's mind flew back to another night at the Grill, when she'd walked into the bar with a smile on her face and a flip of her hair.

_"You can be very sweet when you want to be."_  
_"Yes, I can be sweet."_  
_"Are you going to kill me?"_  
_"Mmm hmm. But not yet." _

"Hey." She felt Tyler's hand on her shoulder, gentle, reassuring. "Are you OK?"

"I'm fine." She found herself blinking back tears. She wasn't even sure why she was crying. "I'm sorry, Tyler." She'd tried to say it yesterday, but she needed him to hear it again-she needed to try and make him understand. "I'm so, so sorry. About Chris, about Klaus, about everything-"

"No, it's not your fault."

"But it _was_ my fault. At least partly."

"No, it wasn't. He just wants you to think that." She opened her mouth to argue, but Tyler shook his head. "It's OK. I get it. I didn't always, before, but I do now." He gave her a little nod as if to emphasize his words, the way he always did when he said something serious and he wanted her to know he meant it. He put his hands on her waist, drawing her close. "I get it," he said again.

And somehow, Caroline knew-he did get it. Her. And she felt a tension ease in her chest that she hadn't even known was there.

She smiled, then stepped away and rubbed the tears off her face with the back of her hand. "Come on, we've got a job to do." She looked at her watch and panicked. "Oh my god! We've been here for over an hour and we still haven't found it. What the hell have I been doing? I've just been talking, and wasting time going down memory lane, and getting creeped out by Klaus's stupid Serial Killer Souvenir Collection, and wallowing in self-pity, what is _wrong_ with me?!" She took several deep breaths (though she didn't need them really; she was undead; she didn't have to breathe), closed her eyes, and opened them again. What was it her group mentor had said during that leadership seminar? Thoughtless action is fruitless action. OK then.

"We have to be more systematic about it," she said. "We can't just look in every last place we can think of. We have to-" Oh. Of course. "We have to get inside Klaus's head. We have to figure out how he thinks and where he'd hide the sword."

"Shouldn't be too hard," said Tyler. She knew what he was thinking. _We did it last night. We figured him out._

They sat down on the floor, trying to solve the puzzle. Caroline closed her eyes again. They _had_ gotten inside Klaus's head the night before. That was why it had worked, right? Though she still wasn't sure just how she'd managed to make him believe it-because she hadn't believed it herself. Not really. Right up until the very last moment, there had been a part of her that screamed that it wouldn't work, that she would die here on the floor, not even in her own house, all alone with nobody except _Klaus_, the way she could've died on her eighteenth birthday.

Caroline shook her head, annoyed at herself. Why did she keep drifting off into daydreams when their task was so urgent? Maybe if she thought aloud, it would help. "Stefan said the sword belonged to one of Rebekah's boyfriends," she said. "Rebekah told Stefan that she buried the sword with him, at the church where they were going to be married." She tried to see the situation from Klaus's point of view, and failed. Of course, it probably didn't help that she _wasn't_ a delusional, egomaniacal, narcissistic serial killer. If she sympathized with anyone in this story, it was Rebekah-though she tried not to think about that. Still, she kept talking out loud, if only to keep from wandering off into her own thoughts again. "And Klaus is a deranged lunatic who treats his family like dirt, but he still has this weird dysfunctional obsession with them. So...maybe it's not just a sword to him. Maybe it's like this bizarro twisted version of an undead post-mortem wedding present. So it has...sentimental value?" Caroline sighed. "That didn't even make sense in my head."

"No, it does make sense," said Tyler. She looked up to find him staring at her, wide-eyed. "The attic," he said.

"What?"

"We should look in the attic," said Tyler, getting to his feet. Almost before Caroline knew what was happening, before she could ask for an explanation, they were running up the stairs to the highest floor, where there was a single locked door. Tyler kicked it open, splintering the wood, and Caroline followed him through it.

"It's full of junk," said Caroline, looking around her in dismay. "Where do we start?" But Tyler had already stopped in front of a giant oak chest, hidden at the back of the room. It looked ancient.

"You said Elena found out that his family came over with the Vikings, right?" Tyler's voice was quiet, and there was no trace of doubt in it.

"Yeah."

"Think they brought this over with them?"

Caroline remembered the illustrations in her history books; remembered Mr. Saltzman teaching them on that bizarre day when Rebekah had just come waltzing in and sat down in their classroom like she was an ordinary student, the new girl transferring in from another state. "Yeah. I think that's a Mikaelson family original." Then she realized what she'd just said. "Um. No pun intended."

Tyler laughed, then gestured back towards the chest. "It's in here."

Later in the car, driving back to Elena's house, Tyler sat in the front seat next to her, fiddling with the sword. "There's something special about this handle," he said, unwrapping the piece of leather wound around it. "There's something written on it, only I don't know the language. And when you turn the screw at the top, I think the letters are meant to form words."

"It's called the pommel," said Caroline, correcting him automatically. She caught herself and looked over at him, but he just grinned at her-the smile she'd only ever seen him give her. She smiled back. She could give him the lecture on what a cryptex was later. "I bet we can translate the code. I've got my laptop in the back seat, and my index cards. It's just a question of being organized and methodical about it." Then she remembered what she had wanted to ask. "How did you know? Where to look, I mean."

Tyler stopped smiling. He turned to look straight ahead, but Caroline got the feeling that he was seeing something that wasn't there. He was quiet for a long time before he spoke.

"It was the only place we were never allowed in," said Tyler. "Us hybrids. Not even when I was sired to him." He wrapped the piece of leather around the sword's grip again, concentrating carefully. "We had the run of the house. He had us doing errands, helping with the construction, the decorating, moving the furniture, preparing for his goddamn dinner parties. The attic was the one place that was just for him. And he told us he wouldn't be happy if any guests ever got in, either." He paused, then went on. "And I thought he'd keep the sword some place that...you know, the house itself didn't have much to do with him. Well, except the paintings." Tyler smirked. "The place, everything in it-it was all brand new. New to _him,_ anyway, even if they were antiques. It wasn't...there weren't any family heirlooms lying around. But he had to have some. Like you said, family's a big deal to him. So I figured he had to be keeping all that stuff someplace that was off-limits."

It took Caroline a while to get it, but then it clicked. Long conversations in the Lockwood cellar in the summer after Stefan had left with Klaus, preparing for full moons. There had been plenty of time to talk while they'd made the place more comfortable, storing sleeping bags in the little cell next door (wrapped in plastic to keep out spiders), putting up a calendar where Caroline had marked each full moon in a neat "X" using a red Sharpie, stocking up on girly magazines that she could read aloud to try and traumatize Tyler while waiting for the moon to rise, to amuse herself, and to distract him from the pain. Plenty of time to tell each other all sorts of secrets.

"Like-like your dad's study," said Caroline. "That's where he had his safe."

"Yeah," said Tyler. Then he echoed her thoughts from earlier. "Feels like forever ago."

"Yeah, it does." Caroline thought over what Tyler had just said about being sired to Klaus. She remembered how he'd sounded, the night before, when he'd offered to be Klaus's slave again, and her grip on the steering wheel tightened. "We'll be free of him," she said firmly, glaring at the road ahead. "Stefan and Elena and Bonnie are going to get the cure, and then we'll ram it down his throat and kill him. It's all going to work out. It _will._" She turned to Tyler, who seemed surprised by the sudden viciousness in her voice. Something about his look made Caroline feel like she was going to break in two. "You're going to be OK. _We're_ going to be OK."

"We're going to be OK," said Tyler quietly.

Caroline pulled up in front of Elena's house. "Alright then," she said. "Let's do this."


End file.
